Various therapeutic disorders may be treatable via administration of medicaments. However, care must often be taken to ensure that the proper amount of medicament is administered to the person in need of the treatment. Often, the amount of medicament required at a given point in time is different than the amount of medicament required at another time. For example, in some instances, the user may suffer from a severe headache or a fever, which may require a higher dosage of medicament to treat than one suffering from a mild ache. Oftentimes, the user has to select the number of pills, each having a pre-set amount of medicament, which he or she believes will alleviate the condition. Such guesswork is highly suspect and may result in the user taking too little or too much medicament for the particular instance. Thus, a system which will allow a variable amount of medicament to be dispensed to a user is desired.
Some previous systems include a medicament in a pre-determined amount, such as U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,394,306 and 7,484,640, and U.S. Publication No. 2002/0108963, which house and dispense dosages in a pre-determined and pre-sized amount. Administration of a medicament in a pre-sized and pre-determined amount may undesirably lead to inaccurate dosages of medicament. The user would need to guess the proper dosage amount (i.e., one pre-sized dosage or two), leading to potentially harmful and destructive results.
The need for a particular amount of medicament to be administered is especially true in the case of persons suffering from diabetic or other disorders wherein the body cannot create sufficient or useful insulin. In some instances, oftentimes dependent upon the particular blood sugar level of the user at any given point in time, the amount of medicament required may vary significantly. The amount of insulin required may depend upon the particular characteristics of the individual, in combination with the particular food he or she has recently eaten or plans to eat, as well as other factors. The user may inadvertently overdose (or underdose) on a given medicament, such as insulin, causing potentially severe problems.
In the case of sufferers of diabetes, such individuals may rely upon a self-monitoring blood-glucose monitor, which measures the level of glucose in the individual's blood at any given point in time. Depending on the glucose level, the individual may need to administer a particular level of insulin into his or her system. However, the particular level of insulin required is often determined by the individual, which is subject to potentially harmful error.
Further, particularly in the case of insulin, administration of insulin has traditionally been achieved via injection of a liquid form. The user may determine the amount of liquid to administer to him via injection. However, administration of a liquid form of a medicament may not always be entirely accurate, whether due to human error or due to insufficient mixing of components in the liquid solution.
Therefore, the currently exists a convenient method of determining the level of medicament required to administer a therapeutically effective dose, which avoids the problems of the prior art.